Wikipedia Faces Growing Pains

Since its birth in 2001, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia from the Wikimedia Foundation, has grown to include more than 1.1 million entries. The English-language version alone has nearly 444,000 entries, all written for no compensation by members of the Wikipedia community.

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The project has grown to such an extent that it is sometimes mentioned as an alternative to other resources like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But with that growth, questions about how credible Wikipedia is, whether it can be respected by the academic community and how it might change are more important than ever. And as Wikipedia continues to expand, at about 7 percent per month, many wonder if the project can stay true to its core principles of openness and co-creation.

"One of the mysteries of scale is that there's no such thing as scaling well," said Clay Shirky, who writes about culture, media and technology. "You can make something 100 times bigger, and if it works, you think you've got it licked. But the next power of 10 can kill it. So I don't know whether or not openness and co-creation are incompatible at Wikipedia scale."

The difficulties Wikipedia faces these days relate mostly to its systems for creating and vetting articles, and whether it covers enough specialized topics sufficiently well to be considered a well-rounded, single-reference source.

Any member of the Wikipedia community can write an entry, which then can be edited by other members. Entries are never finished, given that anyone can make edits to any of them. But that also means there is no final authority who signs off on the accuracy of entries; veracity is assumed to come from the self-policing nature of the community.

Yet that lack of official vetting is central to many of the questions facing Wikipedia today. To academics like Danah Boyd, a graduate student and instructor at the University of California at Berkeley, that is precisely the problem: Wikipedia, for all its breadth of coverage, cannot claim that each and every one of its entries meets any bottom-line standard for accuracy.

"Usually there's only one or two people involved in writing the entries," Boyd said, "and you don't know anything about who they are."

To Boyd, who said she finds the project "an exceptionally valuable tool," the problem is that while some entries, particularly those about technology, are well-read and edited by many community members, countless others have received little or no scrutiny.

"Guess what?" Boyd said. "A lot of ancient-history specialists? They're not online, let alone involved in Wikipedia. But a lot of students are going to Wikipedia for information on ancient history."

In a recent article posted on community site Kuro5hin.org, former Wikipedia developer Lawrence Sanger addressed a litany of problems with the project.

In some Wikipedia areas, "academics and experts of all sorts generally are not accorded any sort of special respect by some Wikipedians," Sanger told Wired News. "If someone is made to defend his or her contribution by some crank, or a troll, the rest of the community, generally speaking, will not come to the defense of the expert."

And that's a problem, Sanger believes, in trying to build a large, well-respected resource.

"There needs to be some sort of deference to expertise," he said. "I think the managers of Wikipedia need to be creative about how this sort of problem can be solved."

Jimmy Wales, president of the Wikimedia Foundation, thinks the project is very healthy.

"Wikipedia is very, very big and has a very active community of contributors," he said. "It is increasingly high-quality. It is increasingly being cited and relied upon in news by academics, librarians and researchers."

Wales acknowledges that Wikipedia is not perfect. He notes that the community does suffer from members writing nonsense entries, or messing with others' entries, but said he and other project managers are determined to look for solutions.

"It is absolutely crucial that we pursue creative, rational processes to get it right," Wales said. "And what that means is everything about how the community and process are managed (is) constantly under review."

Yet Wales also thinks that those who feel Wikipedia, or any encyclopedia for that matter, should be a top-tier reference source are off-base.

"We're after … a standard that is suitable for the general reader," he said. "On highly specialized topics, yeah, it's very unlikely that Stephen Hawking is going to turn to our physics articles to learn something about physics. But if I'm not a physicist, it should lead me to where I'm ready to learn more."

In any case, Wales said he and his team are trying to figure out how to transition the project into what he calls "Wikipedia 1.0."

Essentially, that would mean that at some point, the entirety of the existing Wikipedia would be frozen, and would be considered finished.

Naturally, though, given the open-ended nature of the project, a new Wikipedia based on the 1.0 version would open up at that point, and anyone could add new entries and edit them going forward. But at least at that point, Wales said, people could point to the 1.0 version and say it was a completed work.

He said he's not sure when that will happen, but hinted it would not be in 2005.

The question, then, is what people should expect of Wikipedia. As it grows and becomes a repository of 2 million entries from more and more contributors, more of whom are experts in their fields, it probably will be seen as on par with the Britannicas of the world. But first it must convince those experts to become involved, and that will likely mean finding a way to make them feel welcome.

"What could ensure its survival for a very long time is a system of governance that rewards participation," said Shirky. "That's the hallmark of long-standing communal institutions."

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